First Land in new sims.

I'm curious about the fact that a new sim called Numbat, not yet offered for auction, has scattered around a small number of 512 m2 plots that apparently were offered as first land, many of which are now being offered for sale at outrageous prices by various land barons.

Other sims, Malee & Wombat, also contain some scattered 512 plots that have been recently sold.

Does anybody have any idea how these scattered parcels ever reached the market in the first place?

1. Lindens make a new sim.
2. Lindens subdivide some parcels out for first land, leaving the rest to go to auction, typically as one big plot
3. First land is put up for sale and is immediatley snapped up.
4. Owners of first land immediatly flip land for a huge profit.
5. Buyers of first land then put land up for sale, hoping for even more profit.

Question: why would first land owners buy and then sell straight away?
As I understand it, you can only get first land once, after that you're no longer eligble, even if you no longer own land. Or am I wrong?

You can only buy one First Land parcel at the First Land price per account. But there is nothing preventing you from selling your First Land at a huge profit, and then re-investing that money in better land somewhere else.

Right now, land prices are so high that the parcel of First Land that you paid L$512 for (less than $2 USD) can immediately be resold for over $25 USD worth of Lindens. As a result, people are gaming the system, creating lots of one-month Premium accounts, snapping up their First land, flipping it for a profit, and then transferring the funds elsewhere (to their main account or a string of untracable alts to launder the funds) before cancelling the account. In the last three months or so, we've had over one million new accounts created. I'd bet every L$ I ever earned that a LOT of those are accounts that were created for the sole reason of raping the land pricing for a quick buck. At the expense of the majority of decent SL Players.

The Lindens are "looking into this problem". Given their usual decisive action in similar matters, they will resolve it... oh... eventually... or maybe never...

Meanwhile, an honest Premium account user can't find First Land unless they camp out on the Search tool and pounce on any parcel that shows up, because the thieves snatch it up before a reasonable person can decide if the land is worth buying. The land thieves don't care if the land is crap, because they will only hold it until some desperate fool will pay their asking price.

So a lot of people who are NOT gaming the system, if they do manage to find First Land, see those profits, sell their First Land for the first decent offer (usually less than they could otherwise get for it), rake in a wad of L$, and then take the time to go shop for a decent parcel in a decent sim, far away from the dregs that get sold as First Land.

In my case (almost a year ago now) it was to simply take advantage of the profit and invest that in the larger parcel I actually wanted. You should always at least try to buy first land if you plan on buying any land, if I'd simply bought the land I wanted straight off, I would never be able to get first land at all. This way I bought a parcel @ 512 and resold it that same day for ~3k - seems to be much more margin these days, there was kind of a glut of first land at the time (they'd just dumped a couple new continents that were almost all first land onto the grid). I sold to a neighbor who was planning some kind of bigger structure. I then bought my second land (a 4096) and still have it. If I'd never bothered to get FL I'd have walked away from close to $10us free money. That wouldn't make sense (even though what I actually wanted and ended up buying was bigger than FL).